Review: The Last Guardian

Had The Last Guardian been released at the end of the PS2’s lifespan, or early in the PS3’s with graphics performance scaled for that hardware, I suspect it would have been heralded as an unambiguous masterpiece. A timeless classic without parallel we would have remembered for years.

Releasing in 2016, The Last Guardian is a game of extremes. It’s a beautifully presented adventure that is equal measures poignant and moving, but it was impossible for me to ignore how the game’s excruciatingly long development cycle harmed it.

In far too many ways, The Last Guardian feels like a game struggling to shake off design and development choices from the PS2 era. Too many aspects feel like they were rigidly set shortly after Shadow of the Colossus wrapped up. It feels like Team Ico failed to learn from a decade of advancements in the video game industry outside of increasing their visual quality.

I am a very big fan of the games Team Ico have released up until this point. They are masters of grand scale being employed to tell stories with minimal words needed. They told some beautiful stories in ways digestible with minimal language comprehension required. In an era before we had releases like Journey, Team Ico’s work stood alone as a fairly incomparable set of worlds to explore. I came into The Last Guardian with fairly high expectations purely based on the pedigree of the studio involved.

I was also concerned long before the title released that, if it ever did release, it would be a mess. That is also context for my opinion going in ,which might help you contextualise my points.

I was also concerned long before the title released that, if it ever did release, it would be a mess.

The Last Guardian, without doubt, manages to recapture the narrative elements which made Team Ico’s previous releases so critically well-received. It tells a story of a relationship between two terribly real-feeling characters by showing you how struggling together through the same adversity brings them closer together. It shows a tale of trust, protectiveness and shared fear with barely a word spoken, and the relationship shown feels both organic and very much like it will be memorable for a long time to come.

Their adventure is one of unlikely friends forced to realise how much they have to offer each other in spite of their instinctual feelings, and it’s an absolute joy to watch that relationship blossom.

When things do get tense, and my animal companion Trico was put at risk or in harm’s way, I genuinely cared about his safety. I knew logically that Trico wasn’t going to die by scrabbling to not fall off a ledge ten minutes into the game, but I still worried every time he was at risk of harm. That much is a testament to the narrative abilities of Team Ico still being very much intact.

When things do get tense, and my animal companion Trico was put at risk or in harm’s way, I genuinely cared about his safety.

The gameplay itself is usually slow paced puzzle platforming fare, with the occasional high stakes action scene used to push the story forward and give the player a sense of urgency to their adventure. The platforming puzzle gameplay is truly top notch in design, with solutions to puzzles always hinted at in intelligent ways that ensured it never felt as if a puzzle had unfairly kept me from the information needed to solve it. The reasoning given for sections where the young boy has to complete tasks alone (avoiding objects which scare Trico) makes sense, and every time I had to separate from Trico I felt a real pang of guilt and concern for my abandoned friend.

But, there are some glaring issues with The Last Guardian, one of which made these beautifully designed puzzles hellish to actually get through once a solution had been discovered. Trico’s AI needs a HUGE rewrite.

In many puzzles, you are required to call for Trico, get his attention, and get him to do something for you. Maybe he needs to stand in a certain spot, maybe he needs to eat something. Getting him to do these things is worse than inconsistent, at times it made puzzles seem impossibly infuriating.

Knowing exactly where Trico needs to go or what he needs to do, shouting for him, and having him either ignore you or run around in circles nowhere near where you need him to be is frustrating as hell.

I have heard reviewers suggest it’s a realistic depiction of a living creature, not always willing to cooperate or able to comprehend your commands. That explanation is fucking bullshit.

That might have held water if it was a rare occurrence, with unique animations tied to it, in a way that felt deliberate and knowing. That’s not the case. It’s common, the game does nothing to suggest it’s a deliberate refusal, and the puzzle gets stuck in an unsolvable limbo until Trico deems you worthy of his attention. It’s annoying. It’s not realism, it’s infuriating game design that left me as a player unable to complete puzzles through no fault of my own.

Also, in Team Ico’s quest for realism at the expense of playability, a huge number of visual elements in The Last Guardian are inconsistently presented. The environment has pathways which lead nowhere (and that’s fine, it can, when used sparingly, lead to a sense of exploring a complex environment) but there’s a lack of basic consistency in which types of area are able to be interacted with. I, at times, lept for ledges which were deemed not grabbable and fell to my death, then moments later had an identical ledge somewhere else work because that was the one designed for gameplay. Dying due to an inability to read interactable environments is another unforgivable sin.

At times the game just seemingly breaks, with animations going wonky and causing player deaths without reason. Any time you need to rely on a combination of the game’s physics engine AND an interaction with Trico, you can find yourself stuck for several minutes trying to do a single simple action. It’s even worse if you have to do so under pressure.

Honestly, most of my issues here feel like products of the game’s stupidly lengthy development time. The Last Guardian feels like a late PS2-era game that has had new coats of paint applied to it for almost a decade, as well as new game design concepts and physics techniques shoved into it, without at any point an attempt to scrap the project entirely and start over with a new game design document.

The refusal to throw the game away and start afresh has left this game feeling wonky, broken and buggy in ways that I doubt will ever get fixed. They feel like they came from having to fit modern design elements into a design document set firmly in stone in the mid 2000’s, and that trying to fix them into an existing system did more harm than good

Oh, and it runs notably worse on a standard PS4 than the PS4 Pro. The Pro can just about manage a stable 30FPS when played at 1080p. When played in 4K on Pro or 1080p on the standard model, the framerate fluctuated between 20 and 30FPS, with occasional dips as low as 10FPS on the standard system, requiring the system to be restarted to fix the issue. Those issues are not too common, but they are a real shame considering the game getting ported up sets of hardware multiple times.

For all the things I love about The Last Guardian narratively, I was consistently frustrated by trying to play it. I could see myself coming back to the narrative every few years like I do Shadow of the Colossus, but I highly suspect I’ll do so by watching a YouTube Let’s Play rather than playing it myself.

The Last Guardian is a beautiful experience that I have no desire to actually control again. If it released a decade ago I might have felt differently.

I hate that such a beautiful game is so unbelievably infuriating to actually play.

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Laura's gaming journey began in the 90′s when she was given a SNES by her older brother with Mario paint. From that day video games were all she thought about day or night, be it playing them, designing them, discussing them or writing about them.

8 Comments

Dreamgazer
on December 6, 2016 at 3:49 pm

I’m currently trying to figure out why one of my client’s word documents doesn’t work. Microsoft Word has decided that the text boxes can only be used about 1 in 5 times you click on them, if you clicked somewhere else first maybe, if you’re scrolled to the right part of the screen. In short, I now know where Trico’s AI came from.

One of the especially annoying things for me about the “Oh, it’s intended, that’s how real animals behave!” is there’s actually a PS2 era game that knowingly and deliberately does that with its dog companion: Haunting Ground. When you start out with Hewie, there’s a non-trivial chance he’ll ignore you or do the wrong thing. You get a series of possible interactions with him, both positive and negative, and by consistently praising him when he did what I asked and scolding him when he didn’t, I had us running like a well-oiled machine within an hour or so of gameplay. So yeah, even in the era this game started in, the Trico-justifications don’t hold water.

I have to respectfully disagree with the review and most of the comments.

The only real issues I had where clunky, weighty controls and the camera issues. Having played it through myself and having read and seen alot of reviews, it definately seems like Trico behaves differently depending on how you play.

Me, for example, never had issues to get Trico to do what I want, even if it took a minute. The physical cues as to wether or not Trico understood you (looking at the thing and yelling out once in approval) always indicated it´s going to do what I intend…and then it did. Sometimes it wouldn´t be in the right spot and shimmied a bit to get into the right place, sometimes I had to jump off, get it´s attention (it would almost always look at me regardless) and point at the thing from a different angle.
Tricos eyes would then follow my fingerpointing, and once again an aproving yell would be heard indicating it understood me. If it was a long jump, it would then motion for me to get on it´s back before continueing.

Buyer beware as your mileage may vary, but I spend alot of time paying attention to Trico, petting, caring, reading and deciphering the body language, and again, had a 9.5 out of 10 times successrate in doing what I needed to do.

Especially once the ability to give more specific commands is unlocked, I found myself using positive reinforcement strategy and making Trico do leaps over stuff, strike out on command, boost me up ledges, catch barrels in mid-air, and I even found a way for it to lay down and have a rest by petting it´s neck for a bit.

I honestly would like to see a bit of research done into this aspect, as it´s the most striking feature of the game. The fact that alot of people DON`T report AI issues and others do, when a fluid, dynamic behaviour concept that changes on your behaviour was stated from the beginning, demands to figure out if they actually did it.
Having two people play completely differently, one caring, one neglectful, and then switch around to the other mid session and comparing their Tricos would rule out if this is a reaction on player behaviour, or just a misunderstanding of the game´s command scheme.

Thus, I conclude that I personally played one of the most moving, enjoyable experiences this decade and ya´ll can think it´s shit. For me, it was worth the wait, worth the hype and worth the 480 bucks I spend on both a PS-4 Pro, the game and the express shipping. Have a nice day.

I find it reprehensible that you would let your prejudices about the long development cycle so steer your review. Are you not supposed to look at a game with as much objectivity as possible? Because I find it a struggle to read through this review and recognize how much it gets distorted by incorrect notions of old game design. This is a modern game and the controls are modern. The controls are vaguely gestures: Top face button describes an upward motion; Bottom face button describes a go down movement. And when you use these to command Trico it becomes a logical extension of what you know about controlling the boy. Also, unlike Shadow of the Colossus, Trico is actually easy to climb. This game has so much design elements that are bang-on with current gamer expectations. And the game teaches you early on that Trico responds differently depending on where you interact on its body. So, I have to ask, did you actually play the game? Sounds like you were too miserable or rushed to pay attention. That’s Jim Sterling’s shtick, and I think you’re better than that.